Bigamy and Christian Identity in Late Medieval Champagne by Sara McDougall (review)

In the study of medieval marriage, the English historians have long dominated the field through the sheer volume of research. However, Sara McDougall’s new book reveals just how wrong it would be to assume that the approach adopted by the English Church to marriage was the norm. In comparison with the ecclesiastical authorities in Troyes, the medieval English Church seems positively magnanimous. Fines and whippings three consecutive Sundays in procession around the parish church are a walk in the park when compared with sentences of imprisonment, even execution, doled out by the northern French Church to bigamous husbands. McDougall demonstrates the unique approach adopted by the northern French to marriage regulation, prompted in large part by the recurrent disruptions to family life caused by the Hundred Years’ War, the Great Schism, dynastic struggles, and episodic plague outbreaks and accompanying famines. Eager to impose order at the most basic level, the Church clamped down primarily on older men who engaged in serial marriages, calling on husbands to emulate St. Joseph, the newly reinvented symbol for male Christian identity.

The strength of McDougall’s fine book lies in its boldness—McDougall asks us to rethink accepted beliefs about medieval marriage. Although other scholars have eschewed the term bigamy because the medieval world reserved the term for married clergymen, McDougall asks us to refocus the lens on the symbolism of marriage, to understand that a layman who violated the “order of matrimony” committed the same crime as the bigamous cleric. Her work also is highly comparative. Drawing on studies from England, France, Belgium, Geneva, Portugal, and Italy, McDougall offers an incisive perception of the matrimonial concerns leading up to the momentous Council of Trent (1563), at which the Church reversed its former policy of toleration for clandestine marriage.

Some of McDougall’s arguments are more compelling than others. In opposition to works by this reviewer, Philippa Maddern, and others who have argued that serial monogamy represents the Church’s failure to persuade the medieval laity of the permanence of marriage, McDougall sees instead that the Church was too successful. Here, her argument centers on the determination of bigamous men to undergo a second church wedding, despite the invalidity of the marriage. McDougall interprets preference for a church wedding as respect for the sacramental nature of marriage. Quite simply, this argument is unconvincing. Since the time of Lateran Council IV, the Church required couples to have their marriages solemnized and punished them if they did not do so. Most instances of bigamy prosecuted at court involved bigamous men with second wives who were entirely ignorant of their husbands’ marital past. The bride-to-be and her family had no reason to believe that they were breaking the law—so, why would they risk her soul by failing to have the marriage solemnized as the Church required? Any man would have had great difficulty in convincing his fiancée that they should begin their lives together in such a risky fashion, especially in a world where women were widely recognized as the more pious sex. Furthermore, adhering to the marriage rituals of one’s culture does not necessarily mean that the participants internalized the ideals behind those rituals. Today, many men and women are married in the Catholic Church, not because they believe that marriage is a sacrament, but because their Catholic mothers want them to have a church wedding. We simply cannot gain insight into medieval mentality through a required ritual.

Nonetheless, McDougall has written a thought-provoking book that will be much appreciated by those across the field.